Located in Eastern Syracuse
Home of Jennifer's FlockSock Sock Yarn, and Art for Your Feet Sock Kits. We offer fiber for the spinner and crafter, as well as hand-dyed yarns and sheep's milk soap. Visit our website at
www.holidayyarns.com

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Sometimes, things get very focused around here. (I like to think this makes us more productive. Don't ruin it for me.) Club kit to get ready, orders to fill etc. This was the last kit for the 2008 club (wow, that year went fast). and I almost feel like I can see a minute of free time coming... nope, sorry. that was just a dust bunny blocking my view. Don't like dust bunnies anyways - I'd only want to dye yarn if I had 'free time'...

Anyways! Part of the club membership includes yarn from the Yarn Fairy. When club members join, they get the chance to give me their top 3 favorite colors so the Yarn Fairy has a clue - because life is too short for ugly yarn. So, I had some Yarn Fairy deliveries to go out with this last kit. Some folks were very specific, some told me to pick for them, others chose not to answer at all. I went through the lists, checked them twice, and began 'assigning' yarn. Then I spent some quality time with my dye pots because I was itching to focus on some Yarn.

Now, I took about a dozen pictures similar to this during the packing process. Piles of a variety of yarns for the Yarn Fairy deliveries. Piles of complete one-of-a-kinders... Just lovely stuff. However, I might have had on about a dozen caffeine patches because these were the only 2 pictures that I could apparently stop the twitching long enough to make the camera take a clear picture.

I loved doing the dye days for these. LOVED. I decided I spend quite a bit of time 'focused' and not enough time 'unfocused'. I'd like to say that at least one day a week from here on out there will be similar 'unfocused' dye days (please remind me) because I enjoy being creative like this, and I hope you'll enjoy the yarns coming out of these days. (And also? These are totally the yarns Lisa is NOT supposed to look at. Lisa? Move along. Nothing to see. Go knit a sock or something.)

In the pictures above, all of the shades of purple come from extra dye from a batch of Neo, and one racy shade of red. (Here's Neo pictured below.)

All of the light green and all of the light blue skeins? Also from the left-over Neo.

The super-dark green? Cleopatra exhaust. (I like that one soooo much, I've named it 'Evergreen' and you can haz more, I just added it to the sockyarn page.)

The orange/red on the far left? Exhaust pot from 'Crimson Rioja' (Kitri) & a little spike of yellow.

The one on the far right? Pink & brown? Ya, the self-striping notion continues to entertain me. This one is called 'Chocolate Cherries' in honor of Valentine's Day approaching, and is also now available.

Glenna & I were talking about the approaching holiday, and got to thinking about some new colors to go with 'Chocolate Cherries'. We decided we needed something 'anti-valentine' and so have 'Bruised Ego' in black & blue painted (mostly) random in black and then overdyed in blue:

Then I decided we needed a little less pink in the world (shhh, don't tell Nora). Something closer to... 'Goth Valentine' painted in geometric designs with black, purple, and blue:

So, there are several new colors available, and I've done some upkeep work on the sock-yarn page, go look - I'll wait here. I hope this makes things a little easier to navigate (and shop).

In fact, let's have a sale on postage. A Valentine's Day Sale. Spend $60.00 and I'll refund your domestic postage, or half of your international postage. Sale applies to all of the yarn and kits, and runs through February 14th.(HINT: If you are a club member, this means you get the postage sale AND the club discount refunded to you...)

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In Club news, for 2009 there are still spaces left, and joining now gets you entered in a drawing for a skein of yarn in your choice of colorway.

I'll be sending out an email to the folks who signed up prior to Jan 15th to get your colorway choice bonus skein for signing up early. That email will go out in the next day or so.

2008 Tsock #6 kits did indeed ship yesterday. (Waldmaus- commence with the stalking.) The post office here announced that I owe them brownies on Monday for all the extra work. Usually we can apply postage at our leisure here and drop off finished packages to them, because they are all in groups by same weight or international. This time around, every kit had to be weighed for differences because of Yarn Fairy yarns and bars of Sheep's Milk & Lanolin Soap etc. It made me a little homesick for Dave-the-Postmaster and our stamp system when we lived at the farm, sniff. I suppose it completed a circle though, since we began this year's club standing in the post office applying postage to each kit individually, cancelling each package, and packing in canvas postal bags. It was very deja-vu-ish. Especially when you consider I'm about to dye a bunch of yarn for not only the upcoming release of Roxie, Tsock 6 from 2007... but also a bunch of Hellfire skeins for the pending release of Tsock 1 from 2008 - Firebird.

I am one of those who say--pick me a color. I love everything the yarn fairy sends my way. I am using my last yarn fairy surprise for my February Socknitters Anonymous project. I am not usually open to such a variety of colors but you have such a great sense of color-focused and unfocused--that I feel confident that I will love any. This puts me in danger going to see the webpage updates.

just in case my email didn't express quite enough joy: I LOVE EVERGREEN! i feel massive, huge, unbelievably vast amounts of love for this color. i have been snuggling it when no one is looking. mostly because erin said she would take it away from me if i didn't stop acting crazy.